Chris Schneidmiller
WC Monitor
9/11/2015
SUMMERLIN, NV – As it strives to reopen the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the Department of Energy is also taking steps to prevent nuclear waste containers from causing another incident like the one that has shut down the underground storage facility, a senior DOE official said on Thursday.
“Not only do we need to recover WIPP, we need to make sure what’s going on at the generator sites is not going to create the situation that we had last February,” said Frank Marcinkowski, deputy assistant energy secretary for waste management.
Among the measures aimed at realizing this goal is augmenting WIPP’s Central Characterization Project (CCP), which is intended to ensure transuranic waste being shipped from generator sites such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) does not contain prohibited materials, “so they’re not only involved in characterization and certification processes at the sites, but we believe [they] can be involved in the packaging portion as well, reviewing those procedures, making sure that any procedural changes are acceptable, ”Marcinkowski said at the ExchangeMonitor’s 2015 RadWaste Summit here.
An Accident Investigation Board report found that the small amount of radiation released in the WIPP underground in February 2014 originated within one of hundreds of containers in which nitrate salts were improperly mixed with an organic cat litter at LANL. While the board identified a number of operational failures that led to what it called a “preventable” incident, one issue was there was no CCP approval process for the packaging procedures in use at waste generator sites the time of the incident, Marcinkowski said. “That’s one of the things that we’re going to be implementing across the board,” he added.
“I think one of the issues you’re going to see as a result of this is to allow the contractor of the WIPP facility as well as the [DOE] Carlsbad Field Office to have more of a role, more involvement at the generator sites … in their waste characterization process,” New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said during a panel discussion with Marcinkowski.
During his presentation, Marcinkowski highlighted the steps DOE has taken to resume operations at WIPP, from revising safety planning to making structural changes in the underground to prevent future radiation releases and fires like the vehicle blaze that also occurred in February 2014. Flynn emphasized the state’s $73 million settlement with DOE, which he said focused on corrective actions such as an independent triennial review that would supplement New Mexico’s own ongoing regulatory oversight of WIPP.
Meanwhile, waste backlogs are growing at facilities around the nation while WIPP remains closed, Marcinkowski said. The department in July acknowledged that its plan to reopen the facility by next March at a cost of $242 million had become unviable due to problems with some equipment and safety needs that must be addressed; it last week received an updated draft restart plan from WIPP management contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, Marcinkowski said, but the document remains under DOE review and its details have not been made public. It is expected to be released this fall. “We wanted to make sure we had some confidence on whatever date we put out there next,” according to the DOE official.
“The schedule is going to really depend upon DOE and Congress,” Flynn said. “DOE’s ability to make the regulatory changes that were required I think is not going to be a problem. DOE’s ability, or their contractor, to really deal with some of the operational challenges that they face … those are things that DOE is currently working on.”
The long list of activities that must be completed before WIPP accepts new waste shipments includes instituting all corrective actions recommended by the Accident Investigation Board, many of which have been carried out, Marcinkowski said. The department also intends by early next year to activate additional ventilation systems to increase the number of personnel and types of equipment that can be used in the restoration process. Operational readiness reviews must be also conducted.
“We are going to recover from this event, we are going to get this facility back open, however we cannot allow issues like this to occur in the future,” Flynn said.
The DOE official said it is premature to discuss how shipments of waste to WIPP will be prioritized among the various feeder sites one storage operations resume. The first priority will be waste produced during WIPP’s own recovery efforts and on material that is stored above ground at the site, which had not been sent underground before the events of February 2014. Factors that will determine the rate of waste shipments from other sites include WIPP’s transportation and material acceptance capacities and “generator site compliance commitments,” Marcinkowski said.
